Advertising is changing the image of pork

The long-term aim is to make pork a regular purchase, changing the perception of pork in consumer’s minds and aligning it with what modern, busy households are looking for from their week-day meals.

The mid-week meals strategy began in 2018 based on research, which showed that consumers wanted to create meals that were quick, healthy, easy to prepare and tasty during the week.

It’s a long-term plan but our campaigns are already changing the way consumers view pork, carefully targeting specific groups of consumers and highlighting different cuts of pork. They continually reinforce those key attributes of pork that meet consumers’ needs, while adjusting the messaging where appropriate to seasonal trends or shifts in consumer priorities.

Pulled Pork

The previous advertising campaign, titled ‘Mix up Midweek with Pulled Pork’ ran from mid-October to late November 2021, and focused on a pork shoulder joint. Halloween and bonfire night themed adverts featured on YouTube and other digital channels were aimed at three specific groups, value shoppers, males and females 25 to 54 year olds and 30-minute chefs. They all achieved great ‘view through rates’, with more than 80% of consumers watching all or part of them.

“Last year’s creative theme was updated to tie in with bonfire night and Halloween, which are rapidly increasing in popularity as some of the biggest foodie events of the year,” said Nicola Dodd, AHDB senior marketing manager. “Our team were able to position pulled pork as the ideal food for bonfire night and Halloween.

“Also, the timing was right to highlight an affordable family meal, with the furlough scheme lifting and households coming under more financial pressure.

“One of the key messages was value, highlighting a way to feed a family for less, while still achieving great taste and flavour. It was also useful to help promote pork shoulder, as a larger cut which requires less trimming during this period of severe labour shortages at the processing plants.”

AHDB’s marketing director, Liam Byrne added: “This is the fifth year of the campaign, and it comes at an important time for the pig sector. Pork was in 3.7% growth v’s pre-pandemic 2019 levels and so we set our sights on helping even more people make the switch into pork throughout October and November 2021. There’s never been more British product lines on supermarket shelves and by promoting a large joint like pork shoulder we hoped to add value by making family mealtimes go further as well as supporting carcass balance.” Adverts and recipes reached consumers via social media, including YouTube, video on demand and dynamic digital posters outside Tesco and Asda stores. “Two thousand butchers’ kits were provided to independent butchers with lots of point-of-sale graphics and recipes in the supermarket aisles so that the campaign had a strong presence in the eight major retailers involved,” said AHDB senior marketing manager Nicola Dodd.

“It’s vital to fully integrate all campaign activity through regular communication and coordination with retailers, to ensure that the relevant cuts are stocked, and campaign materials and recipes are clearly visible in store and online.”

We also worked with Britmums, a network of parenting influencers, on a pork promotion campaign. “This online community has many influencers, all with different priorities and their own followers so LovePork was able to voice the key messages about pork through each of them.  One talked about value, another talked about using leftovers and another focused-on cooking for bonfire night, for example,” explained Ms Dodd.

“All our activity led to #PerfectPulledPork trending on Twitter at No.14 in the UK. In addition, social media posts and advertising on Foodtribe, run by Clarkson, Hammond and May, achieved over 3700 click throughs to the LovePork website outperforming our original targets. The campaign will be partnering with them again in January, covering sustainability messaging and health.”

January Mix up Midweek meals

The January Mix up Midweek with pork campaign ran from 17 January to 27 February kicking off with three weeks of TV advertising, with a full 30 second advert supported by a 10 second version as a further prompt to consumers, to consider pork medallions as a healthy mid-week meal option.

Social media activity was highly targeted and placed in front of audiences who are particularly interested in health, tapping into the trend for New Year’s resolutions and health kicks; as well as people interested in food and new recipes.

“For every campaign, we review and learn from what has worked best and tweak what we do next accordingly. For example, we could see on the website that meals under 500 calories is a popular search term, and we ensured we provided the right type and amount of content to satisfy that interest,” said Ms Dodd.

“The Midweek Meals campaign also complimented the We Eat Balanced cross-sector campaign which aims to drive a positive rethink of red meat and dairy. We created different end frames in our We Eat Balanced adverts and videos for each type of meat and food, so pork got focus as part of that too, which reinforced the positive health messages in the pork specific campaigns.”

Campaign targets

Each campaign builds on the previous one, reminding people of pork’s benefits and reinforcing changes in purchasing habits. The January 2020 pork marketing campaign reached a total of more than 85% of UK households across all marketing channels, with consumers’ desire to buy pork at its highest level in three years. 9/10 people claimed the advert communicated that pork is a healthy food choice and the campaign delivered £12.4m of additional revenue for total fresh pork.

The advertising campaign built on the previous campaigns and specific targets were set including for the TV ads to reach 56% of UK adults on more than four occasions, generate 2.3 million impressions on video on demand, and 10.6 million impressions on social media over the campaign period.

Direct communication

Work goes on throughout the year to encourage consumers to sign up to the LovePork newsletter, helping to steadily build a network of consumers who actively choose to find out more about cooking with pork and are willingto receive direct communication.

Over the recent pulled pork autumn campaign period, 87,912 people used the LovePork website and there were close to 500 new subscribers to the site.

Looking further ahead

The Midweek meals strategy has now reached the end of its five-year plan and there will be a review of what it has achieved so far before developing the next stage.

“The key is to make sure pork continues to become more firmly embedded as a regular meal choice throughout the week” concludes Ms Dodd.